Founded in 1998 in Strasbourg, France, by conductor and pianist Jean-Philippe Wurtz, Linea is an internationally renowned ensemble.

Linea has already performed at important new music festivals and has given concerts in many different places of the world, e.g. New York, Seoul, Budapest, Brussels, Bilbao, Berlin, Huddersfield, Geneva, Lyon, Royaumont, Prague, etc. The shows were broadcast by major radio stations such as France Musique, BBC and SWR (Germany).

Furthermore, the ensemble is committed to fostering young and talented composers through commissions, master classes, and concerts. The Ensemble Linea is also actively contributing to the training of young performers and conductors through its summer academy of new music, at end august in its hometown Strasbourg. A

nother of Linea’s trademarks is its intercultural approach: putting music from other continents on the map, and organizing exchanges with ensembles from other countries.

From the beginning, the ensemble has gained the confidence of famous composers, paving the way for close and fruitful collaborations with big names such as Ivo Malec (CD 2001), Péter Eötvös (CD 2011, master class 2012) and Brian Ferneyhough (Premieres in 2011 and 2013, CD in project).

Jean-Philippe Wurtz was born in 1968, he studied at the National Conservatoire of the Region of Strasbourg where he obtained first prizes in piano, chamber music, analysis. He continued his studies at the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe and received instructions from Ernest Bour whom he met in Strasbourg. At the same time, he was admitted as a student to the International Eötvös Institute where he studied with Peter Eötvös. There, he conducted the Asko and Contrechamps ensembles. In 1998, he founded the LINEA ensemble devoted to contemporary music. In 1994, he was assistant to Kent NAGANO at the Lyon Opera, then to Friedemann Layer at the Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon Orchestra, which he regularly conducts. Since then, he has led an international career as a conductor, with special focus on contemporary music.

A play of continual sonic metamorphoses is also found – even if in a quite diverse aesthetic perspective, and of more ‘narrative’ character – in Alexander Yuryevich Radvilovich’s new chamber work, Shoa, for six instruments. In this piece, the 60-year-old Russian composer – educated at the Leningrad Conservatory under Sergei Slonimsky and then at Darmstadt, the winner of various competitions in Europe, a promoter of the contemporary scene in Russia, the founder (in 1989) of the Sound Ways festival – puts diverse techniques into play in the strings, and multiphonics in the winds (who are also called upon to play percussion instruments), but always with the intention of creating a precise dramaturgy, a story told in sound. A texture of great expressive intensity which grows gradually and continually more concentrated and animated, with more and more rhythmic and angular material, with soloistic entrances which finally give way to an Andante lugubre where all movement is suppressed and there remains only a play of repeated notes and long resonances. Leading exponents of the new French trend of ‘saturationism’, Frank Bedrossian and Raphaël Cendo (both of them disciples of Allain Gaussin and Brian Ferneyhough) have, however, defined rather diverse musical styles for themselves. Bedrossian’s music is characterized by a primitive, gestural, material energy, by a constant quest for sonic distortion; it is based on rough, dry, rocky materials, to the point of noise. But the form is always polished, malleable, comprised of sophisticated sound processes, of complex evolutions. An example of this is one of his first works, L’usage de la parole (1999) for three instruments, with a dense, nervous writing style comprised of rhythmic structures, violent gestures, timbres and textures taken to the extreme which appear to mimic the human voice. However, what Bedrossian is aiming for here is not song, but rather a ‘speaking’ state which goes from whisper to scream, or a sign of the mere presence of the voice, the breath, the respiration. Cendo, on the other hand, works the sound as if it were a mass, with the same attitude as a sculptor, seeking in his music overwhelming, deafening effects also influenced by the Japanese electronic noise art of Masami Akita, by the metal sound of the Swedish group Meshuggah. Emblematic of this language is Rokh, a large work for four instruments, articulated in three distinct parts (I, II and III), which takes its name from a legendary bird cited in the One Thousand and One Nights, a mythological animal with white plumage, of proportions and strength sufficient for it to seize and eat even elephants. Cendo puts into play extraordinarily rich material, taken up in various forms in each of the three panels of the triptych, which allude to the cyclical idea of life, death and resurrection – in the first movement, the writing is of gestural, bruitist character, with sudden changes, lengthy static sections, dense explosions of sonic material.